‘Get me a lawyer’ not clear enough, court says

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UPDATE: This ruling was issued in June. On Dec. 15, the appeals court announced that a majority of its members had granted Sessoms’ requet for a new hearing before an 11-judge panel.

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When 19-year-old Tio Sessoms was arrested in 1999 for the murder of a Sacramento minister, he told police that his father “asked me to ask you guys — uh, get me a lawyer.”

The officers responded by saying they would advise him of his rights and then see if he wanted a lawyer. They also told him two other suspects had already talked to them without lawyers and that an attorney would probably discourage him from giving them his version of events. And they denied his request to call his father.

After they gave him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have an attorney present, Sessoms said he was willing to talk. He then admitted he had taken part in a home robbery in which another man fatally stabbed Edward Sherriff, a 68-year-old pastor at the Cathedral of Promise, affiliated with the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Church. Sherriff was a civil rights advocate who ran a food bank in a poor Sacramento neighborhood. Sessoms was sentenced to life in prison without parole, the same term given to Frederick Clark, who was convicted of killing Sherriff.

Sessoms’ lawyer argued, however, that there was little evidence of his role apart from his confession — and that the confession was invalid because police had disregarded his request for a lawyer. This month, the case reached the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld the conviction in a 2-1 ruling.

The court said police must halt their questioning of a suspect who clearly asks for a lawyer, but that Sessoms hadn’t done that. When he said, “Get me a lawyer,” he wasn’t speaking for himself but was just relaying what his father had told him, Judge Richard Tallman said in the majority opinion June 3.

In the questioning, which was recorded on video, Sessoms “never indicates any desire to transform his father’s advice into his own desire to have a lawyer present,” said Tallman, joined by Judge Johnnie Rawlinson. He also noted that the law requires federal judges to give great deference to the conclusions of state courts, like the one that upheld Sessoms’ conviction.

In an indignant dissent, Judge Betty Fletcher said Sessoms had clearly asked for a lawyer and that police had talked him out of it, in violation of the constitutional standards the Supreme Court established in the 1966 Miranda ruling.

“When Sessoms said, ‘Give me a lawyer,’ he meant give me a lawyer, regardless of whether the request was on the advice of his father, his priest or his law school professor,” Fletcher said. By “waving its wand” and transforming those words, she said, the state court, with the help of the federal court majority, “has made Miranda rights disappear.”

Eric Weaver, Sessoms’ current lawyer, said he would ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. Weaver said he’s taken his own look at the video, and “it seems pretty clear that Mr. Sessoms was asking for an attorney.”